The Red Hand of Fury

May 14, 2018
Set in England just before the outbreak of WWI, Morris’s convoluted fourth mystery featuring Det. Insp. Silas Quinn (after 2014’s The Dark Palace) presents Quinn and his Special Crimes Department team with a series of bizarre suicides. The first victim, a young man named Harold, takes off his clothes and climbs into the polar bear enclosure at the London Zoo with fatal results. All the other victims die naked, leaving behind a pile of their clothes. Each man wears the same sort of brown corduroy suit and gray calico shirt, each possesses a small card depicting a crudely printed illustration of a red hand, and all are associated with Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. After the third suicide, Quinn has himself committed to the asylum, where he hopes to figure out what drove these unfortunate people to act as they did. Secret motives, slow-simmering revenges, and overelaborate plot swings abound. Those expecting a sophisticated psychological explanation for the deaths will be disappointed; fans of traditional puzzle mysteries, on the other hand, will be rewarded.

May 1, 2018
A rash of inexplicable crimes prompts an intuitive investigator to probe perilous territory indeed: his own turbulent past.In the summer of 1914, asylum supervisor Stanley Ince is shocked to come face to face with DI Silas Quinn (The Dark Palace, 2014, etc.), one of the first inmates he had met many years ago, who's now once again bathed and forced into a straitjacket. After this arresting scene, the story flashes back to a baffling series of crimes six weeks earlier. A man named Harold stares intently at a polar bear recently brought to the London Zoo, then feverishly rips off his clothes and leaps onto the bear's terrace, where he's mauled to death. The case falls to Quinn, who works in the Special Crimes Department of New Scotland Yard with his faithful sidekick, Macadam. Morbidity and insecurity dog the detective constantly: "Quinn could not shake off a sense of impending catastrophe." As he investigates, a similar case occurs in nearby Archway, where a naked man jumps from a structure widely known as the Suicide Bridge. On the heels of this death comes a third incident. This time a naked man throws himself onto a direct-current dynamo at a power plant. Rushing to interview the man in the hospital, Quinn shocks everyone present by declaring that the patient is his half brother, Malcolm Grant-Sissons. While Quinn muses on the unhappy end of his stepfather, inventor Hugh Grant-Sissons, Macadam strikes out on his own. Their paths converge in a surprising way.Morris' third is taut and twisty with a psychological intensity that's rare and compelling.

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Starred review from May 1, 2018
London 1914. Police Inspector Silas Quinn faces a daunting case when three men commit suicide in horribly violent ways, after first discarding their clothing. All three sets of clothes are identical?worn corduroy suits. Only Quinn understands the significance of this; after all, he himself was once a patient at Colney Hatch Asylum for the hopelessly insane. And Colney Hatch is also where Timon Medway, a self-described reincarnation of Sir Isaac Newton and Jesus Christ and also one of the most brutal child killers the country has ever seen, is incarcerated. Quinn believes Medway may be using his considerable mental powers to hypnotize patients recently released from Colney Hatch and send them to their deaths; he also fears that the suicides may relate to an experiment led by the asylum's medical staff. Of course, this bizarre theory gets short shrift from both Quinn's colleagues and his boss, and he's told to drop the case. He's convinced there's something very dangerous going on, but how to prove it? Unless he takes the risky step of going undercover and readmitting himself to Colney Hatch. Bleak, original, and absolutely gripping, this historical thriller makes for an unsettling and compelling read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)